He lay back and fell to regarding the ceiling. Fergus, in silence, watched him now with a look of intense curiosity. Perhaps he guessed what it was Ellen had done to him. Perhaps he realized that, without knowing it, he had himself come to look upon Clarence in the same fashion that his sister regarded him ... as a nice, kind, good man whom one tolerated. He was older and paler and more insignificant than he had been in the days when he courted May Seton. What the man needed perhaps was some one—a wife—who would lean upon him, who would think him a wonderful creature. And instead of that he had Ellen. Clarence rose on one elbow and said slowly, “But don’t tell her.... Don’t say I spoke of it.”
It was the end of their talk. They never mentioned the thing again, but in some way the conversation appeared to bring Clarence a kind of dumb relief.
Of course, there were things that Fergus could not have known. He could not have known—Fergus, who took life so lightly—that the little man’s only experience with love had been Ellen. He could not have known that Clarence was the victim of a sensual nature placed by some ironic trick of fate in the body of a prig. He could not have known that the man was the victim of that little vein, so amusing to Lily, which with the march of the years beat less and less passionately. He could not have known that Clarence had discovered love in the body of Ellen and was now love’s victim—that he was being destroyed because he had never known, even now, what love might be.
Of this secret Fergus said nothing to Ellen, perhaps because Clarence had asked him to keep silence and perhaps because he came to understand in the succeeding days that in her present mood, it would serve only to increase the strain. It was not until years afterward that he broke his silence and wrote her that he had known from the first day how matters stood. In his good-natured way, he sought rather to drive away the mood entirely. During the remainder of the week, while Clarence lay in bed, the brother and sister made excursions together into various parts of the city and Ellen, for a little time, grew again eager and filled with the old restless energy. They understood each other, this pair, in a miraculous fashion, though they were in many ways so different. They looked upon the world in the same way, as a great pie from which plums are to be wrested. They knew the same delights of being free and alone, the strange joy of being a part of a vast spectacle from which they were, at the same time, curiously aloof. For neither of them did the past exist. They lived wholly in the future. If there was a difference it lay in this—that Fergus looked upon the future as a land filled with a host of careless delights; to Ellen the future was a country in which lay the rewards of fame, of wealth, of vindication. She would force those who had mocked to bend their knees. As for these, Fergus never even thought of them. The world to him was a friendly place.
He began presently to attend his classes. Clarence recovered and returned to the offices of the Superba Electrical Company, and Ellen, pondering secret plans for the expedition to Paris and Lily, returned to her endless practising. In the evenings she played magnificently, for she had now a superb audience in the person of Fergus who, sprawling on the divan with his eyes closed, listened to her in a sensual abandonment. There were times when it must have seemed to her that Callendar had returned and listened. The old likeness, so elusive, so indefinable, came to live again in the long evenings. She could not say what it was, save that they both possessed a wildness not to be hindered by ambition or restraint or even laws. They were both among those who were born free.
But as the month of October advanced, a depression appeared slowly to envelope her. To Fergus the change became apparent and to Clarence it was acute. She betrayed herself by no single thought or action; it was far less simple and direct. Outwardly she went through the old motions of living. Sometimes in the autumn evenings when the husband and the brother sat listening to her music, Clarence would turn his pale eyes toward Fergus with a look which said, “You see what I mean? What am I to do?” The grayness trapped them all, even the genial, careless boy.
In the hours when she was alone, she did things which might have betrayed her, had they been known. Instead of spending the long hours at her piano she walked for miles, sometimes along the river, sometimes in the park. And she developed a new interest in newspapers, an interest which centered itself upon the columns setting forth the doings in the world of the rich and fashionable. From these she learned that Thérèse Callendar and her son had returned from abroad, bringing with them Sabine and a trousseau which cost fabulous sums. She discovered that the wedding party was not to be in Sabine’s narrow house (it was too small) but in the solid brownstone house of the Callendars. The wedding, said the columns, was to be not in the flamboyant new St. Jude’s on the Avenue but in St. Bart’s two blocks away, a small church of dark brown stone, rather shabby but really distinguished. Knowledge of this sort she had picked up in the course of her brief adventure into the world. She understood the difference between St. Jude’s which was the richest church and St. Bart’s which was the most fashionable. These things were put away in the little pigeonholes of her observing brain (so like the pigeonholes in Gramp Tolliver’s walnut desk).
She learned all this and never once did she betray any sign of her knowledge or her interest. Clarence would have known nothing of the wedding save that Mr. Wyck, over one of their greasy lunches far down town, mentioned it to him with the sly suggestion that his wife might be interested and would no doubt be invited. Wyck appeared to know most of the details, for in the secrecy of his bleak room he read the society columns, and there was always the backstairs gossip which came to him through the two aunts in Yonkers. Over the apple-sauce, and under the eye of the peroxide blonde cashier, he insinuated other things, suggestions that Ellen might even be more interested than her husband imagined, but Clarence either was too stupid to understand these hints or in his loyalty saw fit to ignore them.
But when he returned to the flat he did say to Ellen, “I see your friend Mrs. Callendar’s son is being married. I suppose you’ll be invited to the wedding.”
Ellen glanced at him sharply and then returned to her work. “No,” she said calmly. “I don’t think I’ll be invited. Why should I be?”